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Website up. Website down. Website back up again!
Submitted by bharat on Sat, 2003-04-05 10:01
I apologize for the multiple downtimes the website has had in the last two weeks. There were a variety of issues that have (hopefully) all been resolved at this point. I doubly apologize for not warning y'all about this most recent downtime since I actually knew about it in advance. Read more for the details.This website runs on a server in a colocated facility in San Francisco. Several friends and I are sharing half a rack at the United Layer facility. United Layer is a relatively new player in the space but they've been giving us a good deal and taking care of us.
The first downtime was a planned upgrade. I say "planned" in the sense that I'd been planning on doing it for a while, but hadn't worked up the necessary energy. That was about a 2 hour outage from 11 PM 3/26 to 1 AM on 3/27. During that time I upgraded the software that powers the Gallery website, which was much overdue.
Sadly, the next downtime, a 6 hour outage from 6 PM 3/31 to 1 AM 4/1, was because the guys we share the rack with did something to their router that caused it to route packets off into the wild blue yonder leaving my poor server dazed and confused. It took us quite a while to figure out what was going wrong, then another couple of hours to track down the right guy to fix it during which time the site was basically inaccessible.
The third and most recent outage is because we had to change IP addresses within our ISP's netblock. This was a bit of a pain, and it started around 9 PM on 4/4/2003. I updated all the DNS entries and moved the box to the new IP address but it will take a while for the DNS servers to catch up. It should all be squared away within 24 hours of the cutover. I knew that this was coming, but was so overwhelmed with my day job that I didn't get a chance to put the proper warnings up on the net. My apologies.
The good news is that there are no outages planned in the future. The server is stable and is running about as fast as can be reasonably be expected. We're getting plenty of hits (10M hits in 3/2003 of which 3M were page views from 166K unique sites) and humming along nicely.
I appreciate all the kind offers from folks who are willing to host this website. At the moment I'm happy doing it myself, but if that changes I'll be sure to follow up with you about it.
regards,
Bharat
The first downtime was a planned upgrade. I say "planned" in the sense that I'd been planning on doing it for a while, but hadn't worked up the necessary energy. That was about a 2 hour outage from 11 PM 3/26 to 1 AM on 3/27. During that time I upgraded the software that powers the Gallery website, which was much overdue.
Sadly, the next downtime, a 6 hour outage from 6 PM 3/31 to 1 AM 4/1, was because the guys we share the rack with did something to their router that caused it to route packets off into the wild blue yonder leaving my poor server dazed and confused. It took us quite a while to figure out what was going wrong, then another couple of hours to track down the right guy to fix it during which time the site was basically inaccessible.
The third and most recent outage is because we had to change IP addresses within our ISP's netblock. This was a bit of a pain, and it started around 9 PM on 4/4/2003. I updated all the DNS entries and moved the box to the new IP address but it will take a while for the DNS servers to catch up. It should all be squared away within 24 hours of the cutover. I knew that this was coming, but was so overwhelmed with my day job that I didn't get a chance to put the proper warnings up on the net. My apologies.
The good news is that there are no outages planned in the future. The server is stable and is running about as fast as can be reasonably be expected. We're getting plenty of hits (10M hits in 3/2003 of which 3M were page views from 166K unique sites) and humming along nicely.
I appreciate all the kind offers from folks who are willing to host this website. At the moment I'm happy doing it myself, but if that changes I'll be sure to follow up with you about it.
regards,
Bharat
